shock. The Pagan gazed aloft, into the
fearful breaches which yawned above him, with ungovernable awe. His
small, fitful light was not sufficient to show him any of their
terminations. They looked, as he beheld them in dark relief against
the rest of the hollow part of the wall, like mighty serpents twining
their desolating path right upward to the ramparts above; and he,
himself, as he crouched on his pinnacle with his little light by his
side, was reduced by the wild grandeur, the vast, solemn gloom of the
obscure, dusky, and fantastic objects around him, to the stature of a
pigmy. Could he have been seen from the ramparts high overhead, as he
now peered down behind his lantern into the cavities and irregularities
below him, he would have looked, with his flickering light, like a mole
led by a glow-worm.

He paused to consider his next movements. In a stationary position,
the damp coldness of the atmosphere was almost insupportable, but he
attained a great advantage by his present stillness: he could listen
undisturbed by the noises made by the bricks which crumbled from under
him, if he advanced.

Ere long, he heard a thin, winding, long-drawn sound, now louder, now
softer; now approaching, now retreating; now verging towards
shrillness, now quickly returning to a faint, gentle swell. Suddenly
this strange unearthly music was interrupted by a succession of long,
deep, rolling sounds, which travelled grandly about the fissures above,
like prisoned thunderbolts striving to escape. Utterly ignorant that
the first of these noises was occasioned by the night wind winding
through the rents in the brick of the outer wall beyond him; and the
second, by the echoes produced in the irregular cavities above, by the
footfall of the sentries overhead--roused by the influence of the
place, and the mystery of his employment, to a pitch of fanatic
exaltation, which for the moment absolutely unsteadied his
reason--filled with the frantic enthusiasm of his designs, and the
fearful legends of invisible beings and worlds which made the
foundation of his worship, Ulpius conceived, as he listened to the
sounds around and above, that the gods of antiquity were now in
viewless congregation hovering about him, and calling to him in
unearthly voices and in an unknown tongue, to proceed upon his daring
enterprise, in the full assurance of its near and glorious success.

'Roar and mutter, and make your hurricane music in my ears!' exc